Tag: Art

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Aesthetics Travel

Day 1680 and Tricking Your Parasympathetic Systemic Into Offline Relaxation Mode

I was introduced to music curators for what you might call third spaces in the aughts. If you were very good, you might program television show but the work of designing audio atmosphere was often about hospitality.

Boutique hotels, luxury gyms, and luxury boutiques looking to set a mood would hire these talent for playlists that fit into their brand book.

We’ve come to appreciate just how much a full sensory experience encompasses every detail. Decor, lighting or even a house fragrance can all be ruined by overloading your guests with discordant noises.

Unless it’s a nightclub or cocktail lounge, the blending of audio spaces and creating the right vibe to open up your guests to the experience is about settling sympathetic nervous system into the openness that comes with the “rest and digest” chill of the parasympathetic response.

I was part of a team that made playlists for Milk Studio’s New York Fashion Week, looked over the shoulders of the creative director who hired a well known curator for their playlists.

Fashion runway shows in Paris, Milan and New York City would also hire these DJs sometimes being the top of the diffusion spear but they were often collaborating with hotels where the fashionistas stay.m

I saw how the Standard Hotels made choices for their properties and was inspired by their work to get even deeper into the best boutiques and their choices. The beloved Parisian fashion staple Stéphane Pompougnac who became the wildly successful Hotel Costss house DJ.

Hotel Costes 6:
Combining casual glamor, “retro-canaille” and smooth house, this compilation evokes the luxurious, eclectic and elegant atmosphere of Hotel Costes.

Stéphane Pompougnac (born 1968) is a French houseDJ and record producer best known for curating and mixing the Hôtel Costes compilation series

It’s become such a part of my own relaxation and time off routine, I can hear a few bars from Hotel Costes 6 (a particular favorite of mine) and immediately feel calmer. Amazing what a ritual we can make of music. Sure it is silly but you can’t beat decades of somatic learning.

Maybe I’m not always going “a la peche” but my body doesn’t know that. From there, all I need to do is open up an Ian M Banks paperback and I can slip into a short trip of my own. Amazing mow malleable our minds can be to repetition.

Brand collaborations are everywhere you look
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Media

Day 1671 and Warenästhetik

I have a favorite book store in San Francisco is called City Lights. It’s an old Beat bookstore that carried the city through its left wing era.

They have a section called commodity aesthetics from which I treat myself to a fresh book from every time I visit San Francisco. I’ve got quite a collection from the habit.

Having spent the requisite time with the western cannon, I enjoy dabbling in critical theory and its decedents like commodity aesthetics as an adult.

The Frankfurt School has direct line from Horkheimer to the founder of commodity aesthetics Wolfgang Fritz Haug. Warenästhetik, in German, is the process of aestheticising products we make and consume.

Marxists go on about the seduction and manipulation of consumers in order to reinforce capitalist systems but it’s hard to ignore the impact of the field on what we make, use, and sell.

The wider world of why and what commodify is ever changing even as it recycles the same archetypes and patterns over and over again. See the Sydney Sweeney’s “good jeans” remake of Brooke Shields infamous Calvin Klein advertisement.

It’s amusing to me that the Marxist have put in more effort to understanding the nuts and bolts of making and selling desirable goods than capitalists do. Maybe that’s what they mean by praxis? The criticism and the practice come together in one bookshelf in a basement of a bookstore in North Beach.

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Culture Politics

Day 1606 and Woody Allen Panopticon

The internet loves to have fights over which intellectual, religious, artistic, or political views are discredited by the sins of its people. We have to police all kinds of things lest the youth get the wrong impression.

If you dig into any serious gathering of humans you will be shocked by human nature. You shouldn’t be but Americans have it pretty good so we often are. This despite us living in a Woody Allen panopticon where we cannot separate the man from the work. We are forced to look at others sins constantly.

And it’s upsetting I won’t lie. Way more people than you’d like fall into the pederast camp. I didn’t even know that was a word till I met some Italians. Blessedly free of this knowledge in lived experience. Woody Allen, Michel Foucault (he gave us the panopticon) and Socrates were all committing sins against children. I’d argue you can skip Annie Hall but you shouldn’t skip Plato or Foucault.

Depending on whose authority you crave you the real danger to watch out for is different historical flavors of Marxists and fascists and where they settled.

Plenty of academics and journalists dislike understanding humans for who they were in their time and judging them in context of their output.

That’s dangerous according to more than a few scolds in the media and the academy. Drop the term Straussian and see how it goes over at a dinner party. Dangerous truths ahhh!

There are lots of little shibboleths for discerning which Hegelians took a turn with the Italian futurists. Have you heard of Russian Cosmism?Also dangerous. Don’t even get me started on what it means that JD Vance may or may not be an Ulster Scott and what that does or doesn’t mean to certain sects of reactionaries.

I honestly can’t keep up despite being as relatively close as one can come to being expert weird future fixated movements while not being a historian or a journalist.

Guilt by association in the process of living through history is both a horrifying and sticky business if we look too closely. I have a shelf full of Modernist Marxists which I’m certain wouldn’t have allowed me to survive the Red Scare despite my intense dislike for communism. So beware the Woody Allen panopticon. It comes for everyone. But also leave them kids alone.

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Culture Internet Culture Reading

Day 1600 and Uncertain Milestones

I read some Charles Dickens today. No this isn’t a Great Expectations joke. Rather, I read the first seven paragraphs of his 900 page novel Bleak House.

Why? I wanted to test my literacy as part of social media’s great ongoing debate about humanity’s waning reading and writing abilities.

A Substacker & Twitter personality broke down a 2015 think-aloud reading comprehension study which analyzed the skills of English majors at two Kansas universities.

[They were asked to] read the first seven paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House out loud to a facilitator and then translate each sentence into plain English

They Don’t Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities.

The Substacker Beloved Kitten has written about what constitutes mass literacy before using something called the PIAAC which has five levels of literacy.

If you are a knowledge professional you better hope you are a four but social media comments suggest most of us are not.

This methodology doesn’t even try articulate level 5. And as someone who occasionally sees what a real 1% outlier looks like I don’t disagree. Our best are in a league of their own.

So obviously as American funded “college for all” it was clear not all college attendees would on the right side of average. And as it turns out, the English majors at highly subsidized state universities (mostly white girls incidentally) had a lot of trouble understanding Dickens’s British family court tragedy.

I also don’t want to read that many pages of fog metaphors, and I have an entire tag dedicated to forced metaphors.

I took the test (speaking my answer into my phone) and it was harder than you think to simplify but I had the vocabulary.

Amusingly all of the test takers were sure they could easily finish the stupid book after most of them failed to understand even its basic concepts. I would not finish Bleak House.

Like those other white girls I am unlikely to be in the 1% of literacy when it comes 19th century British literature. Surely in my own skill stack (and it’s overlapping areas of expertise) I can approach 2SD on things. I suspect this blog and my general internet presence suggests I can do Level 4 reading. We think around what we can.

That seems adequate given I contribute what I like and communicate what is enjoyable on my own spaces. Here I am plodding along contributing sixteen hundred days of writing to the public discourse which is its own proof of literacy. It’s several novels worth of training data for our artificial intelligences.

I think about how much I do or don’t want to contribute to the maw of publicly indexed Internet because I believe we get better if we all contribute to this public good.

Our future is a shared coordination problem requiring we can comprehend and contribute to our commons. Maybe I understand enough Dickens to get by. He maybe has a dimmer view of legalistic thinking than I do. But I’m sure he’d see plenty of wretches in our times too.

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Aesthetics

Day 1580 and Learn By Doing

Techne and episteme are foundational concepts in Greek philosophy. Practical knowledge and theoretical understanding are interwoven for humans.

Aristotle distinguished between five virtues of thought: technê, epistêmê, phronêsis, sophia, and nous, with techne translating as “craft” or “art” and episteme as “knowledge”

Via Wikipedia

As I enjoyed a brief trip to the academy last week I am myself considering how much meaning I derive from knowledge or episteme comes from my enjoyment of applying and experimenting with techne in my daily life.

As I’ve been pondering my own thought and it how it will change in this new era of artificial intelligence I find a calling to practice the virtues of thought in all its forms.

I have a love of chemistry and its applications in beauty. I find virtue in aesthetics and I enjoy many practices within it. Beauty is virtue with a long cultural history. Feminine cultural traditions of potions, cosmetics, and ablutions are an intertwining of disciplines that reflect our embodied humanity within our natural world.

And so in considering how I like to solve for my own pursuit of personal beauty I engaged with a friends interest in pursuing a personal routine that matched her needs, her heritage, her time and her resources. I wrote her an issue and packaged together a set of samples across all those variables with my own library of cosmetics.

A routine of cosmetics based on a set of inputs for a particular girlfriend

I’d love to formalize a way of sharing my knowledge and the flavors of personalization as it’s an enjoyable process of inputs with clear joyful outputs that I hope makes the daily life of someone better. And that might be how I teach myself the use of some new tools.

A Pareto optimal skincare test for under $100 a year
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Community Politics Startups

Day 1571 and Townie Done Good

I am excited to be a panelist at an academic conference at my hometown’s university later this week.

While I didn’t attend the University of Colorado at Boulder myself, as a townie kid it holds a special place as educational institution in my life.

Their libraries lent me books, I attended events like their famed Conference on World Affairs and I made use of campus facilities from sports fields to their planetarium.

CU Boulder helped make me who I am today. Which is apparently someone who is qualified to weigh in on challenging topics in technology and culture.

The conference is called Renegade Futurism: Tech and the New Political Counterculture

Tech” isn’t like other industries. In addition to money and products, it is now a source for politicians, policy, culture, and philosophies with unprecedented influence throughout the globe. Figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel hardly count as mere industrialists; they function as thought-leaders and government operatives.  
 

This two-day conference gathers actors from today’s tech world–entrepreneurs, makers, thinkers, observers, and critics–to discuss the meaning of the tech counterculture, and what it might entail for the future of technology and American democracy.     

Hosted by the Bruce D. Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization on Friday April 25th and Saturday April 26th and it is open to the community so if you are nearby please consider registering and attending.

The speaker line up is very impressive from politicians like our very own governor Jared Polis to journalists like James Pogue and entrepreneurs, operators and industrialists like myself.

My topic is first thing and the panelists are well worth being up early to learn from.

April 25th Atlas Building ATLS 100 – Cofrin Auditorium

9:00AM-10:15AM “How dissident is today’s tech?”

Technology can be a democratizing tool or a weapon of centralized authority. If those are perennial alternatives in technology’s history, which has predominated during recent years?

Panel: Michael Gibson, Jeff Schullenberger, Patrick Deneen, Julie Fredrickson
Moderator: Paul Diduch

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1569 and The Sky Above The Port Tuned To A Dead Channel

I spent the night in a port city in Greece as I am making my way back to Western Europe. I’ll be crossing by airplane via polar routes on my way to Colorado next week for an academic conference at my home town university.

I feel like I’ve made it when I am invited to speak on topics like Renegade Futurism. I’m now old enough to have lived a couple rounds in the “dissident technology” discourse so I hope to have something of value to say to new generations.

“You can’t get the little pricks generation gap you.” Molly Millions Neuromancer

On the long drive back from Istanbul I am listening to William Gibson’s Neuromancer to set myself in the right mood after the mix of antiquity and modernity I encountered this week.

One doesn’t cross thousands of kilometers and centuries of empires without requiring a bit of an aesthetic change.

Sunnier ports than in Gibson’s Neuromancer

The weather is more sunny Mediterranean Easter weekend than the non-climate skies of a future Japan’s Chiba and Night City, but with really any port city at night I can’t help but think of the famous first line of cyperpunk’s foremost novel.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer

And so I tuned in to a story of oligarchy, artificial intelligence, dissident coders and cyborgs with mirror shades. In that near future the protagonists make a stopover in Istanbul too and it involves medically advanced nervous system treatments too. Gibson’s cyborg chop shops are almost as advanced as what I saw this week.

Hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy

Gibson’s 1984 novel is as relevant in 2025 as it ever was. Our timeline has become his later work in uncanny ways but his cyperpunk aesthetic has become as timeless as the domes of Constantinople.

The elephants eye domes of a hammam

Whatever transition we are about to make as humans as our own Wintermute intelligences arrive will be rocky. I don’t know who will be the dissidents and how centralizing power may prove to be.

One can just start to see corporate post-nation states emerge. Maybe they will look like Tessier-Ashpool S.A. Maybe it will look like Elon Musk’s family office Excession. Of course, that’s an entirely different science fiction novel about artificial intelligence.

Polybius’s cycles of political revolution chart
Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1564 and Driving Along the Wine Dark Sea

The road to Constantinople is long. Whether a knight on horseback crusade bound or a bitch in an Audi, it’s a long haul to Istanbul.

That’s not me flexing honest just that the rental guy sold me on the quattro as a comfortable ride for long hauls so for you cavalry types it’s the destrier of our times.

My route is basically hugging the Aegean. I drove down the Adriatic, nodded at the Ionian and spent an evening on the Aegean before breaking at Thessaloniki. The reverse was no picnic for Odysseus and he started in Troy. Which is around the corner relatively thinking.

Unlike our friends in antiquity, I have further to go to make it to the capital of empires that is Istanbul.

I’m excited for both the work on the ground but also to see the sights. Making it across multiple border crossings is absolutely worth to see the intersection of so much history. Oh and also to tour a factory.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1554 and Complex Coordination

I’ve never been much for listening to music while I do work. I’ve always found it distracting if not downright annoying. I don’t really believe I’m capable of multitasking. If a task requires my focus and coordination it will get the sum of it.

I’m not convinced anyone is particularly good at it if the studies on focus and multitasking are to be believed. Task switching costs, reduced cognitive efficiency and mental fatigue are typical indicators of the distraction of multitasking.

I was given a reminder of the strain of complex coordination as I was relaxing last night. I enjoy Star Trek: The Next Generation and found myself rewatching Data’s Day,” Season 4, Episode 11 in which Dr Crusher teaches Commander Data how to dance before a wedding.

Being an android, Data is able to easily mimic the doctor’s movement after being shown them. But as he learns to the nuances involved in waltzing with the partner he tells doctor (paraphrasing)

“This is complex set of variables to coordinate”

“Try to act like you are enjoying it!”

As Data tries to integrate the dance moves, their joint body language, the changing direction, and variable speeds you get a visceral sense of why embodied compute requires more processing than intelligence tasks. The final challenge? Smiling while coordinating it all.

Resting Android face? Data tries to smile while waltzing via Memory Alpha
Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1549 and Productive Primates

We are in a moment of narrative collapse. The elites who we’ve typically take our “consensus reality” cues from don’t know where to land in order to manage the revolt of the public and you can see the recycling of big ideas happening at a rapid pace.

If you’ve been on the internet at all recently, you were probably exposed to both Ezra Klein’s Abundance book tour and the Studio Ghibli mania using AI to turn iconic images into Miyazaki animations.

I think these two events are more related than you might think. Labor is becoming simultaneously more and less productive in the face of artificial intelligence. This naturally has consequences for power.

This progress is either “an insult to life itself” if you are Miyazaki or offers the potential to improve human productivity in ways we’ve not seen since the Industrial Revolution.

Which brings us back to the moderate state capacity liberals and Ezra Klein’s book tour. They are out in the cold politically and yet rather than produce a new narrative they’re re-heating the work of the meme movement effective accelerationism.

I’m pleased to see total narrative victory for e/acc over the effective altruists. Sustainability (or worse degrowth) has simply failed to resonate with our primate hierarchies that demand more. We want more of whatever other monkey’s have be it bananas or status.

Socialist zero sum politics encouraging sharing & collectively managing resources having been roundly beaten in the zeitgeist, the moderate left are insisting that actually public state mechanism are the best means to achieve abundance. Government is good actually.

Making the case for the state’s role in creating abundance is about all they have left while they wait for the pain of Trump’s tariff policies to kick in. The private markets not having the necessary time frames for long term planning is a perennial issue.

Even our most productive technology companies are feeling the pinch to perform immediately in the short term. Alex Danco dropped on essay on where we might be in the S-curve of artificial intelligence.

He argues that perhaps in the scaling of this infrastructure we may change our thinking around code as “the primary asset” of software companies and reorient it back to the shared labor, management and final product of the traditional corporation. Software companies were valued for capital efficiency by the markets but perhaps that constant no longer applies.

All this worry about creating abundance is a battle of who decides how we allocate future resources (which we don’t yet have) and who will receive the biggest share of power and plaudits in the process.

The fact that we can replicate aesthetics in an instant or do the document work of a dozen legal associates with a program isn’t really the issue at hand. We are worried that how we divvy up the sum of all our hierarchies is changing. Of course that worries every primate. It’s bloody stuff.